Later the Same Day: Stories

By Grace Paley

Grace Paley's stature among writers of short fiction was established by her first collection, The Little Disturbances of Man (1959), and reconfirmed with the publication of Enormous Changes at the Last Minute in 1974. This new book, a selection from her work over the past ten years, is appropriately titled Later the Same Day: Paley's concerns, or themes, have changed only as much as life's constants change with the passage of time. Those characters familiar to readers of her previous volumes have grown older but are still deeply involved with their parents, their lovers and friends, and their children--the past, present, and future--and the welfare of the wider community. We meet the neighborhood druggist with his tale of familiar heartbreak and small-time bigotry ("Zagrowsky Tells"); a willful father in Puerto Rico who cannot accept the obvious loss of his child by kidnapping ("In the Garden"); a black woman who mourns the fact that her daughter, "born in good cheer," has become only "busy and broad" ("Lavinia: An Old Story")' a visitor from China whose concern is about the children, how to raise them" (The Expensive Moment:); a craftsman whose beautiful creation is stillborn ("This is a Story about My Friend George, the Toy Inventor").

The seenteen stories in Later the Same Day are marked by Paley's low-keyed humor, her rich but economical use of language, and her seemingly endless capacity for empathy. Their substance--the persistence of human and political concerns, despite practical pressures--subtly overwhelms less important matters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Oct 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781466884090

Grace Paley

Grace Paley (Nueva York 1922- Vermont 2007).

Book preview

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Love

Dreamer in a Dead Language

In the Garden

Somewhere Else

Lavinia: An Old Story

Friends

At That Time, or The History of a Joke

Anxiety

In This Country, But in Another Language, My Aunt Refuses to Marry the Men Everyone Wants Her To

Mother

Ruthy and Edie

A Man Told Me the Story of His Life

The Story Hearer

This Is a Story about My Friend George, the Toy Inventor

Zagrowsky Tells

The Expensive Moment

Listening

Also by Grace Paley

Copyright

For my daughter and son, Nora and Danny,

without whom my life and literature

would be pretty slim

and for Laura, our newest person

Love

First I wrote this poem:

Walking up the slate path of the college park

under the nearly full moon     the brown oak leaves are red as maples

and I have been looking at the young people

they speak and embrace one another

because of them I thought I would descend

into remembering love     so     I let myself down hand over hand

until my feet touched the earth of the gardens

of Vesey Street

I told my husband, I’ve just written a poem about love.

What a good idea, he said.

Then he told me about Sally Johnson on Lake Winnipesaukee, who was twelve and a half when he was fourteen. Then he told me about Rosemarie Johanson on Lake Sunapee. Then he told me about Jane Marston in Concord High, and then he told me about Mary Smythe of Radcliffe when he was a poet at Harvard. Then he told me about two famous poets, one fair and one dark, both now dead, when he was a secret poet working at an acceptable trade in an office without windows. When at last he came to my time—that is, the past fifteen years or so—he told me about Dotty Wasserman.

Hold on, I said. What do you mean, Dotty Wasserman? She’s a character in a book. She’s not even a person.

O.K., he said. Then why Vesey Street? What’s that?

Well, it’s nothing special. I used to be in love with a guy who was a shrub buyer. Vesey Street was the downtown garden center of the city when the city still had wonderful centers of commerce. I used to walk the kids there when they were little carriage babies half asleep, maybe take the ferry to Hoboken. Years later I’d bike down there Sundays, ride round and round. I even saw him about three times.

No kidding, said my husband. How come I don’t know the guy?

Ugh, the stupidity of the beloved. It’s you, I said. Anyway, what’s this baloney about you and Dotty Wasserman?

Nothing much. She was this crazy kid who hung around the bars. But she didn’t drink. Really it was for the men, you know. Neither did I—drink too much, I mean. I was just hoping to get laid once in a while or maybe meet someone and fall madly in love.

He is that romantic. Sometimes I wonder if loving me in this homey life in middle age with two sets of bedroom slippers, one a skin of sandal for summer and the other pair lined with cozy sheepskin—it must be a disappointing experience for him.

He made a polite bridge over my conjectures. He said, She was also this funny mother in the park, years later, when we were all doing that municipal politics and I was married to Josephine. Dotty and I were both delegates to that famous Kansas City National Meeting of Town Meetings. N.M.T.M. Remember? Some woman.

No, I said, that’s not true. She was made up, just plain invented in the late fifties.

Oh, he said, then it was after that. I must have met her afterward.

He is stubborn, so I dropped the subject and went to get the groceries. Our shrinking family requires more coffee, more eggs, more cheese, less butter, less meat, less orange juice, more grapefruit.

Walking along the street, encountering no neighbor, I hummed a little up-and-down tune and continued jostling time with the help of my nice reconnoitering brain. Here I was, experiencing the old earth of Vesey Street, breathing in and out with more attention to the process than is usual in the late morning—all because of love, probably. How interesting the way it glides to solid invented figures from true remembered wraiths. By God, I thought, the lover is real. The heart of the lover continues; it has been propagandized from birth.

I passed our local bookstore, which was doing well, with The Joy of All Sex underpinning its prosperity. The owner gave me, a dependable customer of poorly advertised books, an affectionate smile. He was a great success. (He didn’t know that three years later his rent would be tripled, he would become a sad failure, and the landlord, feeling himself brilliant, an outwitting entrepreneur, a star in the microeconomic heavens, would be the famous success.)

From half a block away I could see the kale in the grocer’s bin, crumbles of ice shining the dark leaves. In interior counterview I imagined my husband’s north-country fields, the late-autumn frost in the curly green. I began to mumble a new poem:

In the grocer’s bin, the green kale shines

in the north country it stands sweet with frost

dark and curly in a garden of tan hay

and light white snow …

Light white … I said that a couple of questioning times. Suddenly my outside eyes saw a fine-looking woman named Margaret, who hadn’t spoken to me in two years. We’d had many years of political agreement before some matters relating to the Soviet Union separated us. In the angry months during which we were both right in many ways, she took away with her to her political position and daily friendship my own best friend, Louise—my lifelong park, P.T.A., and antiwar-movement sister, Louise.

In a hazy litter of love and leafy green vegetables I saw Margaret’s good face, and before I remembered our serious difference, I smiled. At the same moment, she knew me and smiled. So foolish is the true lover when responded to that I took her hand as we passed, bent to it, pressed it to my cheek, and touched it with my lips.

I described all this to my husband at suppertime. Well of course, he said. Don’t you know? The smile was for Margaret but really you do miss Louise a lot and the kiss was for Louise. We both said, Ah! Then we talked over the way the SALT treaty looked more like a floor than a ceiling, read a poem written by one of his daughters, looked at a TV show telling the destruction of the European textile industry, and then made love.

In the morning he said, You’re some lover, you know. He said, You really are. You remind me a lot of Dotty Wasserman.

Dreamer in a Dead Language

The old are modest, said Philip. They tend not to outlive one another.

That’s witty, said Faith, but the more you think about it, the less it means.

Philip went to another table where he repeated it at once. Faith thought a certain amount of intransigence was nice in almost any lover. She said, Oh well, O.K.…

Now, why at that lively time of life, which is so full of standing up and lying down, why were they thinking and speaking sentences about the old.

Because Faith’s father, one of the resident poets of the Children of Judea, Home for the Golden Ages, Coney Island Branch, had written still another song. This amazed nearly everyone in the Green Coq, that self-mocking tavern full of artists, entrepreneurs, and working women. In those years, much like these, amazing poems and grizzly tales were coming from the third grade, from the first grade in fact, where the children of many of the drinkers and talkers were learning creativity. But the old! This is very interesting, said some. This is too much, said others. The entrepreneurs said, Not at all—watch it—it’s a trend.

Jack, Faith’s oldest friend, never far but usually distant, said, I know what Philip means. He means the old are modest. They tend not to outlive each other by too much. Right, Phil?

Well, said Philip, you’re right, but the mystery’s gone.

In Faith’s kitchen, later that night, Philip read the poem aloud. His voice had a timbre which reminded her of evening, maybe nighttime. She had often thought of the way wide air lives and moves in a man’s chest. Then it’s strummed into shape by the short-stringed voice box to become a wonderful secondary sexual characteristic.

Your voice reminds me of evening too, said Philip.

This is the poem he read:

There is no rest for me since love departed

no sleep since I reached the bottom of the sea

and the end of this woman, my wife.

My lungs are full of water. I cannot breathe.

Still I long to go sailing in spring among realities.

There is a young girl who waits in a special time and place

to love me, to be my friend and lie beside me all through the night.

Who’s the girl? Philip asked.

Why, my mother of course.

You’re sweet, Faith.

Of course it’s my mother, Phil. My mother, young.

I think it’s a different girl entirely.

No, said Faith. It has to be my mother.

But Faith, it doesn’t matter who it is. What an old man writes poems about doesn’t really matter.

Well, goodbye, said Faith. I’ve known you one day too long already.

O.K. Change of subject, smile, he said. I really am crazy about old people. Always have been. When Anita and I broke up, it was those great Sundays playing chess with her dad that I missed most. They don’t talk to me, you know. People take everything personally. I don’t, he said. Listen, I’d love to meet your daddy and your mom. Maybe I’ll go with you tomorrow.

We don’t say mom, we don’t say daddy. We say mama and papa, when in a hurry we say pa and ma.

I do too, said Philip. I just forgot myself. How about I go with you tomorrow. Damn it, I don’t sleep. I’ll be up all night. I can’t stop cooking. My head. It’s like a percolator. Pop! pop! Maybe it’s my age, prime of life, you know. Didn’t I hear that the father of your children, if you don’t mind my mentioning it, is doing a middleman dance around your papa?

How about a nice cup of Sleepy time tea?

Come on Faith, I asked you something.

Yes.

Well, I could do better than he ever dreams of doing. I know—on good terms—more people. Who’s that jerk know? Four old maids in advertising, three Seventh Avenue models, two fairies in TV, one literary dyke …

Philip …

I’m telling you something. My best friend is Ezra Kalmback. He made a fortune in the great American Craft and Hobby business—he can teach a four-year-old kid how to make an ancient Greek artifact. He’s got a system and the equipment. That’s how he supports his other side, the ethnic, you know. They publish these poor old dreamers in one dead language—or another. Hey! How’s that! A title for your papa. Dreamer in a Dead Language. Give me a pen. I got to write it down. O.K. Faith, I give you that title free of charge, even if you decide to leave me out.

Leave you out of what? she asked. Stop walking up and down. This room is too small. You’ll wake the kids up. Phil, why does your voice get so squeaky when you talk business? It goes higher and higher. Right now you’re above high C.

He had been

Reviews for Later the Same Day

[philsyphe · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

The only reason I didn’t give up on this collection halfway through the first tale is because I had to do a joint presentation on the author as part of my MA degree.Checking other reviews, I see I’m of a minority who can’t stand these type of stories. I did expect to like this collection more than the author’s previous two books of shorts – neither of which impressed me – but turned out that this one was the worst of the three.On the whole I was either bored, irritated, or both. I skipped a few tales, owing to them grating on my nerves. I especially hate how, in all but one of the tales, there’re no quotation marks for dialogue. Several times I hadn’t a clue who was talking, or if it was the narrator.Plots are virtually non-existent. Each story more or less revolves around people chatting about political matters, which is of no interest to me whatsoever. If it’s not political, it’s just commonplace gossip. In short, it comes across as the author’s way of expressing her opinions through lacklustre characters.Speaking of characters, there are too many per story for it to be possible to feel any sympathy for any of them, never mind getting to know them. A good short should have two or three main characters, whereas many of these have more than I can care to remember.

[albertgoldfain · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Impressively wide ranging character voices and styles, but none of these stories is very memorable.

[jimmychanga · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Enigmatic stories, not light but containing lightness. Very funny. A sympathetic humor. The short ones are very strange. Off-kilter occurences following their own logic, sometimes reminds me of Jane Bowle's stories, but with broader concerns. Politics is in there a lot, the stories are more about the ways people deal with politics in their own lives, rather than trying to make any political points. I like her voice a lot, and she has recurring characters. Faith and her friends Ruth and Ann and Susan. She doesn't use quotation marks to set off dialogue and it can be really confusing when a lot of people start talking, but she does dialogue well, and her stories are sometimes hard to follow but they go in these weird directions without any kind of explanation. I like that. I also like, in her shorter stories, where she doesn't try for any kind of realism. Like in "At That Time, or The History of a Joke".

[suesbooks · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This book disappointed me now and the previous time I read it. There was so much in each story that would have made for intereting commentary, but I felt the writing was so evasive I got nothing out of it.